War of the Sexes – Part 2

Part 2: COST-BENEFITS or “Do-the Add-Ups & Take-Aways”or who pays the “cost”? and who gets the “benefit”?

From Part 1 “.. In summary, from primordial times, this binary form of reproduction has resulted in very different methods and strategies, for each to maximise its chances of successful offspring”.   

While there are numerous speculations on why sexual reproduction, and diploidy (ie double-stranded DNA) evolved, one of the more common lines of thought, is that asexual reproduction, or cloning, especially single-stranded,  is doomed to failure over time.

This is because of the “Xerox problem”. Take a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy enough times, and your image will fade. Errors creep into DNA, and over the generations, information is lost, the errors and blank spots become so many that the organism becomes unable to sustain itself.  If all the members of a population are copies of each other the whole population dies out. Doubling the DNA from absorption from an external source, allows a greater chance for the errors to be corrected by the presence of a ‘good copy’.

Another related reason, is based on the principle of conservation of energy.  All life, needs to absorb nutrients and convert those nutrients to energy for growth and survival.  Minimum energy input is enough for minimum maintenance, but reproduction, even at its most simple through doubling of a parent cell – needs much more energy, than mere survival and maintenance does.

Weak cells with limited nutrients, may still have enough energy stores to double, but ending up with two smaller, compacted cells each time it divides, sacrificing other biological mechanisms to maintain the survival of just its central core.  This way it minimises its energy needs, while still having a chance of its ‘core’ being picked up by a larger cell.  Motility and speed are the drivers of this reproductive method towards quantity, and self-sacrifice - often trading off longevity and survival (with higher energy costs) for the chance to pass on its genes. Quickly producing multiple small fast short-lived mobile copies of itself, increases the chance further that one or two will get picked up by larger nutrient-rich cells, and incorporate its core in the next generation.

Other benefits of sexual reproduction are assisting in the spread of advantageous genes, and assisting in the elimination of disadvantageous genes, hence the drive towards quality with increased energy investment.  Some species of plants and water-based creatures, alternate asexual reproduction with sexual methods in alternate generations depending on environment.  Asexual reproduction with high quantity/ minimum energy can fill ponds or other ecosystems very quickly with clones. As the population reaches maximum and some die off due to lack of nutrients, they switch to sexual reproduction to maximise quality of fewer offspring.

In flowering or sexually reproducing plants, many can self-fertilise being hermaphroditic, but this sacrifices quality for maintenance/survival. Others need to cross-fertilise with another individual, and some plants have distinctive separate male and female individuals. The male cell, or pollen in plants, is produced in larger numbers, is small and often motile with or without assistance from other species.  The female is larger again, forming fruit or other high nutrient casings for the seed(s) or embryo(s). 

War of the Sexes : Part 1

Part 1 NUTRITION, SURVIVAL and REPRODUCTION

The first Law of Nature on Earth, is that sufficient numbers of individuals of organisms must survive long enough to reproduce. If not enough survive, if not enough reproduce, the species dies out. Since all living things die, Nature selects for those groups of organisms which have successful ways of not just surviving but reproducing. The most misquoted, misinterpreted and misunderstood section of Charles Darwin’s discussion of Natural Selection in evolution is “survival of the fittest”. It should more appropriately be read as ‘survival of the fit enough’.

The oldest and simplest form of reproduction is single cell division to form a clone or ‘daughter’ cell. Most single-celled organisms reproduce this way. Prokaryotes are single-cell organisms with no nucleus or other identifiable cellular organelles, and its DNA is diffused throughout the cell. The primordial Earth environment had no protective atmosphere or ozone layer to filter the sun’s radiation. These early single cells of life were prone to UV radiation damage, especially with no protective nuclear membrane for their DNA.

From the earliest beginnings, reproduction has involved exploitation, conflict, and compromise between individuals. All organisms must “eat”, they need to metabolise nutrients to gain the chemical energy needed to push the chemical reactions to grow, replace or repair damaged cell components, and especially to  reproduce.  Even the simplest cloning cell-division reproduction method, requires doubling of every cellular component, and so, only the largest, healthiest nutrient-rich cells would have energy resources and get a chance to divide and split into two.

They could not have absorbed enough from the primordial chemical soup, especially if damaged. The most likely method to ensure survival, was to “eat” or cannibalise each other. In prokaryote cells, the DNA of a damaged cell being eaten would be absorbed into the ‘eater’ cell, to form raw material or ‘building blocks’ for the cell to repair and replace its own damaged DNA and other cellular furniture. If they absorbed enough other cells, any additional nutrients to basic survival and maintenance could then be stored and used to provide sufficient ‘power’ for the doubling of all their cell furniture, including DNA, and split into two cells.

Those cells able to scavenge well enough amongst the remains of their more damaged neighbours were the ones that survived and reproduced most successfully. Sometimes fragments of the DNA from the eaten cells might be incorporated intact, into the new daughter generation of cells. An early form of promoting genetic variation.

A binary model of reproductive strategies started to evolve in tandem in the earliest life forms, eons before true sexual reproduction appeared.  Small cells versus bigger cells.  Smaller cells traded off or ’sacrificed’ size, longevity and nutrient energy needs of maintenance and growth, to be more opportunistic in reproduction, taking in just enough energy to maintain their DNA core, ensuring the insertion of their DNA into the larger, more nutrient rich cells, often dying in the process but ensuring that their genetic material had some chances of living on by being incorporated into the DNA of the larger cells.

The next step was to form eukaryote cells, with a nuclear membrane to provide some protection for the now single-stranded DNA deep inside the cell and separate it from other cell furniture. This allowed a better chance of protection from being completely ‘eaten’ and a chance to replace and repair damage, and also allowing genes to still survive intact, into the next generation, being harder to fragment. However, this larger more complex cell structuring needs more energy to maintain itself, with little left over for the enormous energy requirement of doubling in size and substance to clone a daughter cell. So more energy was being stored for defence and maintenance of its genetic ‘core’ from other predatory cells. The larger cells became more long-lived with a defence capability, but also less fertile, in that they reproduced less often, but more successfully when they did. Some severe human diseases are caused by long-lived, but slow reproducing bacteria, such as those causing leprosy and tuberculosis. They have such efficient tough defence membranes that they are often difficult to treat taking many months or even years of treatment with specialised drugs. 

In some single cell bacteria, a form of sexual reproduction has evolved, known as “bacterial conjugation” in which neither cell dies in a ‘mating’. Some cells in a population contain F-factor genes (or Fertility-factor genes), on a separate small strand of DNA close to the cell membrane surface (known as a plasmid), which is separate to its core DNA strand or chromosome. F+ cells are donors of the F-Factor genes, F- cells are recipients of F-factor alien DNA (with subsequent daughter clone cells being F+), F0 can neither donate or receive, and F1 (or F-‘prime’) are F+ donors, that can donate other core genes as well as the F-factors. Bacterial conjugation, or transfer of F-Factors, and other stray genes between cell lines, is one of the most common causes of antibiotic resistance developing in bacteria.

This takes extra time, energy and effort, which is a “cost” or “risk” to the organism, but the reward or return on such “investment” is in more successful reproduction.

The next step is in moving from single-strand DNA organisms to creating diploid organisms, species which have two copies of all the genes required for survival of the organism, in double-stranded helical DNA. These organisms have developed specialised cells that reproduce in the cloning way for organs and tissues. This is still a cloning reproduction, where cells double in size then split off into two identical cells. This is mitosis, how the cells of the body of all organisms divide and grow.

And also specialised cells for reproduction. They form cells known as gametes which are haploid, with single DNA. The cells divide twice without doubling in size, so only one copy of the DNA is stored in the gamete.

In biological jargon, the form of a species which forms specialised cells for the donating of genetic material, is arbitrarily defined as the “male”, and the form which makes specialised cells for the receiving of the donated material, the “female”.

Gene Thieves – Misogyny in Sci-Fi

A warning post, in case anyone feminist-minded, is accidentally sucked in to reading this.

The sci-fi thriller ‘Gene Thieves’ by Maria Quinn is being hailed in book reviewer circles, including in the Lawyers Weekly.

I could not get past page 70-something after the surrogate mother is killed, because the woman-hating misogyny was so depressing.  A near-future world where women are still nothing but pornified fucktoys, air-headed bimbos and walking incubators. And of course, all the men are Heros – with a capital H - (especially the lawyers).

My only excuse for picking it up was the blurb synopsis sounded interesting.  

In this future world, marriage has long gone, and replaced by Conjugal Contracts for up to 5 years.  Few people have their own children, other than the desperately poor, and the use of surrogacy through IVF is common, by singles or couples under contract. Surrogate women are paid very well for their services. It is common for young women to undertake a surrogacy contract to obtain their own ‘Nest Egg’.  

Dr Mitchell “Piggy” Brown, is a lonely genetic scientist who strikes it rich and desperately wants a child, but somewhat different, as he wants to use an embryo from his own parents eggs and sperm. Not quite legal, he turns to a lawyer,  ”Dancer” for help. Dancer recognises Piggy from boyhood school days as a boy taunted for his unfortunate looks, where the nickname Piggy comes from. In guilt for his childhood bullying, Dancer agrees to help.

Dancer turns to ’The Nest’, the official centre for surrogates, and obtains the service of a surrogate who wont ask too many questions about the baby she will be incubating for Piggy, and ends up with Angela, who comes with  a 6-year old daughter, Molly.

The book then turns into a crime thriller, many of the characters have secrets within secrets, and Angela is murdered, the baby boy is kidnapped for ransom by a multinational pharmaceutical company cartel, as Piggy Brown has discovered the secret of the genetic ‘fountain of youth’, the immortality gene.   Dancer and Piggy are joined by Jack Lee, Chief Investigator for the UN Ethical Science Council – and our Holy Trinity of squeaky-clean angelic male Heros is complete – as the blurb says so dramatically:  ”Jack has to take charge of the case – for the sake of humanity’s future”

While the book is being lauded for its exploration of “ethics”, the ethics of female-subordination and exploitation is never questioned, indeed it is extended and improved upon.

For example, Marina, Dancer’s current Conjugal Contract “wife” is the resident psychiatrist at The Nest, and is an unprofessional pornified fucktoy, responsible for the “mental health” of the surrogates.  At one point she calls Angela “a cow of a mother” and discusses her personal opinions about her surrogate clients at home in bed with Dancer – how’s that for professional ethics?  Indeed, everybody hates Angela, she’s not very pretty for a start. Piggy Brown is not very pretty either, obviously, but everybody feels sorry for him.

Since Angela is such a terrible mother (not that we see any real evidence of this), cute little Molly forms a loving bond with Piggy,  to become her ”dad”.

There are many comments about how some couples are so fussy that the surrogate must look pretty and be well-educated.  Some say, they dont understand, its just the uterus, doesn’t matter if she’s mentally retarded, fat and ugly.

All the women put men first before children (a few put sons first – but never daughters – if no man around), but Angela is hated because she puts herself first before children or men, and is presented as a rare psychotic syndrome. 

The male characters are either fucking women left, right and centre and giggling about it, or are found  pontificating in poetic drama about their sainted dead mothers, and Dancer is heartbroken and devastated when he finds out his mother did something illegal before she died. Or,  they are bonding with each other in deep personal friendships. Whereas the women all hate each other, and act petty and spiteful. Both Dancer and his male partner in the law firm, have children without mothers in the picture - Dancer has a 16-year-old daughter Daisy who is an air-headed teen bimbo worrying about her toe-nail colour.  The message is loud and clear, men are the best parents and mothers should just fuck off and/or die.

There are hints with the crime thriller theme, that one of the undercover operatives of the multinationals is a big muscled butch dyke. When Angela is violently murdered during labour giving birth to Piggy’s genetic brother, NOBODY gives a stuff - she is not considered human.  It was not even considered much of a crime by the major characters.  (She was insane anyway).

Thats when I had to throw the book away as I couldn’t tolerate it anymore.

Postcards from the Plate (Part 3)

Food as Language.

Food as Porn.

“In some recent poststructuralist work, food (and the mother’s breast) has also been specifically associated with words and self-representation (or identity). This association is foregrounded in Kristeva’s scenario of abjection in which food symbolically competes with words. But we also find it articulated in recent work addressing prohibitions or disciplinary protocols used to control groups who might other wise be perceived as unruly. Less well theorized, but certainly evident in a wide range of narratives about the forging of individual, national and diasporic identities are more positive definitions and descriptions of food as consolidating communities or genealogies ranging from the family to the nation…. – Cross-Cultural Perspectives On Women, Identity, Food – University of British Colombia Workshop, 1998

Food as Language? Food for Thought, indeed.

Woman’s Language. Woman’s Words.

Women’s Business. Women’s Work.

Double, double, toil & trouble. Fire burn, cauldron bubble. Eye of newt, tongue of toad. Famous murderesses are the poisoners. Mad, mad women slump, thump around kitchens, expressing madness with pale offerings, melted plasticware, burnt offerings, lime & bitters. Eve and Snow White, seduced by an apple, witches have insatiable appetites.

Puberty Blues girls mustn’t eat in front of the boys they want to impress – to do so breaks a rule.  A ‘disciplinary protocol’ to control the ‘unruly’?

Announcement for a Radical Lesbian Feminist Festival – When, Where, and What’s to Eat? “….for anyone who wants to come early to help chop vegetables and plan the revolution.” – Food is Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Work – even for Revolutionaries. More “positive definitions …… consolidating communities“?

Language of Food, is Language of Solidarity as well as Division. Women United/Divided by Food.  The bulk of agricultural workers are women, the bulk of food processing workers are women, the bulk of food is sold, prepared, cooked, bartered, carried, and shared by women.

What messages we send through food! Pleasing mothers-in-law, grandmothers, getting-to-know-you – we instinctively offer food, or help out in the kitchen – holiday dinners, afraid to offend, or quick to offend in our rebellion/rejection of the Language of Women. We know how much it means to them to communicate through the food they’ve prepared. We *hear* other women’s messages encrypted in the stuffing, salads, desserts, sauces. We both Love/Hate it as Bonding/Bondage.

Food is the Language of Women. Food is Serious Business, Women’s Business, Women’s Words, Women’s Work – We grow, harvest, pound, grind, shell, slice, chop, julienne, grate, sift, squeeze, pinch, knead, roll, bake, saute, fry, grill, shred, blend in instinctive and conditioned rituals – too much, too little – never sure, the agony and the ecstasy – we love/hate our food Bondage/Bonding.

TV ads – women serving food mountains-high, smiling beatifically at margarine. Dad gets take-away, but Mum’s hands are the ones to dish it up. Magazines for women, so many about food, catering, dinner-parties, healthy lunches for pre-schoolers, diets, ‘summer-slim’ recipes. Women always serving food, but never eating in ads – why is that?

Except maybe – snack-foods, directed at the adolescent market, when cartoon, or disembodied exaggerated feminine lips seductively lick phallic chocolate bars, or play, snatch, throw, steal them, peel them – but are not shown actually eating? What message does this Food Language send? The Pornography of Food? Woman is Object. Source of Nourishment, symbolic Fountain Breast of all pleasure – she provides pleasure with her hands this time – disembodied hands serve chicken nuggets fresh from the oven. Men and children eat. The woman smiles, radiant, standing while the subject eaters sit. There are none left for her – she doesn’t mind. The girls of Puberty Blues dispense burgers, chips – there is none for them – they don’t mind, they ate earlier, secretly - they smile, radiant their secret safe.  

Dainty morsels only when menfolk are around. So thoughtful women are, being cheap dinner dates. Binge, feast & puke when alone, or with the girlfriends, in secret. Men and children first, women must wait their turn.

Food as pornography, indeed. Popular misogynist relationship books, the Men are from Mars, Women From Venus books – men need ‘quickies’ the author says, for ’sustenance’, a maintenance ‘diet’, so to speak – if women love their man they will provide regular ‘quickies’,  the author says, and he will provide ‘home-cooked’ sex once a week – ‘gourmet’ sex once a month – in return. She must wait her turn, in return. She masturbates, silently, secretly in the bathroom.  Or binges and pukes.

Reminder of the old hunter/gatherer paradigm. Hunter food is not regular day-to-day sustenance food, it is ‘feast’ food, ‘party’ food – it is rare, special, an occasional ‘treat’ – provided by the male. The greatest chefs in the world are men we are told. Sustenance diet of ‘quickies’ in bed, and ‘quickies’ on the breakfast table are Women’s Business, Women’s Work.

Messages of the Language of Food get mixed-up, mix-mastered, mashed, pulped, blended, dropped, lost, spoiled, boiled off, fallen, over-cooked, burnt, too cold, too stale, too hot, too spicy, hunger, hurt – tones/tomes overloaded with too much salt or sugar, pleasure or pain.

Anorexia. Bulemia. Mad, Mad Women. Misfit women, earth-mothers, laughed at – their contribution to nutrition/nurture not valued. Weight-watchers. Junkie women extol the virtues of appetite suppression by heroin, cocaine, speed, crack.  Diseases of heart, kidneys, thyroid, are wondrous for appetite-suppression. Misfits. Diets. Obsessions. Cravings. Chocaholics. Sweet-tooth. Church functions – the invitation reads ‘Ladies, please bring a plate’. Bake-sales – out of fashion now, our grandmothers wistful for cinnamon, home-made ginger nuts, lamingtons.

Misfit women pay homage to the Joy/Despair of Food, Life, Love, Women – chopping vegetables for the Revolution, chopping their bodies. Diabetes. Heart disease. Iron-deficiency. Blood thin, blood-letting. Tiredness, lethargy, allergies. Diet Coke. Take-out, take-away, disposable. Daytime TV discusses stomach-stapling surgery and the Joy of Herb Gardens.  Binge, feast & puke when alone, or with the girlfriends.

Mad, Mad Women – we come to love/hate food, we starve, we purge, we feast and stuff, we hunger, we feel for bruised tomatoes, pick carefully through apples, obsessed with ‘purity’ we cuddle our half-litre bottles of water to flush away the poisons, we love/hate our bodies, love/hate our Selves.

——————————————————————————–

Oh girls, girls, Silly little valuable things,

You should have said, No, I am valuable,

And again, It is because I am valuable I say, No.

Nobody teaches anybody they are valuable nowadays. — ‘Stevie’ Smith

 

Postcards from the Edge of the Plate (Part 2)

“…the egg the female brings to maturity is a complete feeding mechanism…..the devaluation of the milk that has no price-tag is part of the generalised devaluation of women’s bodies and contributions to the nourishment of the race, a devaluation that is now reaching its nadir in a distorted attitude to food on the part of women themselves……..The pattern of devaluing women’s contribution is as old as human civilisation. Clearly food production and consumption have changed vastly since industrialisation, but the devaluation of women’s contribution remains a constant.”– The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer, 1999

THE MOTHER AND FOOD

“….A significant portion of this work situates mothers as the nexus between food and pathology. Indeed, since the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis with its focus on oedipal narratives of subject formation, mothers have been a particular focal point and the move from this to women and food has often been made, both in the negative terms which “blame” mothers for eating disorders, and in the more positive social goals that inform movements such as La Leche. – Cross-Cultural Perspectives On Women, Identity, Food – University of British Colombia Workshop, 1998

Its all our mothers fault. Got it.

Play-groups, inner-city creches, mothers, babies, toddlers underfoot – the Lebanese women laugh at us for snatching away the nuts, at our fear of babies choking on them. In Lebanon, nuts are the traditional first-solids & their babies don’t choke, they say. A Turkish mother, heavy in black asks ‘Why can’t you white women feed your babies? ” – defensiveness, mumblings of ‘my doctor said..’- ‘I work, you see…’, ‘I kept getting mastitis…’ blushing, awkwardness, changing the subject to something neutral – food, coffee, lunch. The Turkish woman offers to show us how to make baklava & Turkish coffee, to ‘make your milk strong for your babies’.

A lifetime of girltalk, cakes, biscuits, take-away, chocolate – feminist collectives discussing funding, submissions, actions, marches over crackers, dips, nibblies and cheap wine.

Kaffee-klatsches, coffee-mornings, brunches, kitchen-teas, baby and bridal showers – without men around we feast on Womens Business, Women’s Work.  Office buildings, middle-class professionals – organising office functions, women office workers pore over faxed menus, argue the relative merits of seafoods and soups.  ‘Let’s do lunch’ the office women say – and we discuss which restaurant, what sort of food, in Loving/Bonding detail.

.

Postcards from the Edge of the Plate (Part 1)

“Food as a passion, a gift, a means of revenge, even source of power –….Women weigh up the loss of a lover, or the loss of weight; they consider whether hunger and the thought of higher things are inextricably linked; they feast and crave and die for their appetites, or lack of appetite” – The Anger of Aubergines : Collected Stories of Women and Food – Bulbul Sharma, India, 1998

Women’s Work, Women’s Business — watching TV.. surfing channels, noting the high frequency of images of women and food – food commercials of course, but also soap-opera women ‘doing lunch’ in an up-market city restaurant, to village women & girls in India, pounding grain in huge shallow pits, tossing the pounding pole to each other, chanting in a complex dance. Jamaican women harvesting bananas. Bangladeshi women planting rice. Mexican market-women selling vegetables.

Women’s Work, Women’s Business…  More postcards, tourist snaps, 30-second news bites. Russian women standing in food queues. Chatting with a neighbour in the frozen food aisle of my local supermarket. Refugee women in some warzone preparing AID mash. Suburban backyard barbecues with women around the food tables – helping to toss a salad, or hand finger-foods to a toddler. Picking grapes – teenagers summer job – in awe of the Italian women – laughing, talking, sweating – stripping the vines for the higher-paid ‘table grapes’, teaching me my first lessons of hard-labour in high summer heat – ‘No drink. You get sick. Suck on a grape, keep mouth wet. But you no drink, you be sorry”   Shelling peas, stringing beans in the kitchen with my mother, I squirm to get outside. Sleep-overs at friends houses, stunned by rituals of fathers, boys served, fed first. Women, girls must wait their turn.

Women’s Work, Women’s Business… Childhood on a small farm. Dawn on a winters morning, warm, frothy full-cream milk from Betsy, our family goat. Being violently ill from overdosing on wild watermelon at age 5. Never eat it again. Men killed the chickens, us women plucked them, gutted them, “dressed” them. (Why do they call that “dressing”?) Shooting game, rabbits – sneaking fruit, corn from farms. Separating the milks by hand, hand-churning butter, squeezing cheeses.

Women’s work, Women’s Business. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts agonise for weeks, months over weddings – the catering arrangements are Serious Business, Women’s business, Women’s Work.  Fires, floods, disasters – armies of women cutting sandwiches, filling thermos flasks. Women’s Work, Women’s Business.  False dawn in an inner city industrial district. End of shift at the biscuit factory. Giving my boxed share of broken biscuits to the women with kids, swapping recipes for biscuit bakes in our breaks.

Women’s Business, Women’s Work Backpacking with an English girl through Australia’s deep north, we haul netloads on the prawn trawlers, stopover in Bali – the Indonesian women filleting fish in long, cold sheds above the beach. Hungry women, famine in Asia, Africa – women are the last to die, but the first to feel its pain, as they wait their turn behind men, children. Women and girls must wait their turn.

North-west Australia. Isolated mining town – Iron ore country, Hammersley Iron Mines – H.I.M. trucks pepper the roads of red sand, red desert, red coastline – 12 young white women, British, Australian, Canadian, Swedish, German – serving breakfast, dinner in the single men’s mess – pays well, very well.  A girl’s gotta eat, No? Do the maths. 1,000 single men, 12 women – pick one each sistren, or you’re free-for-all. Balancing several layers of breakfast trays of greasy eggs on our arms, Croatian cooks slapping floured handprints on our bums. The wives in the married men’s compound glare at us, one or two nod politely, hosing their lawns in their transplanted suburbia in the desert. Judy, with her classy British accent speaks up ‘Anyone for tennis after brunch?’. We laugh.

Lazing, sunning on the beach between shifts, the men lunch underground, we nibble stale pastries, quibble over canned fruit – the black women, abandoned by the H.I.M. men who spent the night ab/using them, on their own stolen land, walk past us on their return journey to the Reserve – 10 dusty, red iron-ore hot kilometres inland. We give them the cans of fruit. Promise to give them more.

The Personal is the Political. Food is Personal and Political.

University years. The big city.  Private-school sophisticated city-girls sneer at my ignorance of restaurant etiquette. Student households, endless arguments over PC foods, grocery shopping, kitchen work.    We define our status, class, race with Food.

 Vegetarian or not, kibble-wheat & rye breads, we argue the politics of Marx and Mitchell Munching Muesli. Stories of visits to India, Thailand, Fiji discuss the spirituality, the transcendence of curries, nasi goreng, rice and coconut. Waitressing in a Mexican restaurant – meals part of the deal. I am sacked for constantly munching nachos & tacos. Sharing sweets, nuts, savouries in bed with a lover. On the dole in Newcastle, waiting for the cheque to arrive. I rescue carrot peelings from the bin, fry it in honey. Another time I stirfry soggy cabbage with vinegar, oyster sauce, vegemite broth – throw in the remains of an old packet of noodle soup. I tell my sistren the story of how I failed Home Science in high-school, laughing we eat my invention anyway, hunger really is the best sauce. We name it Australasian Sauerkraut.

Watching a film – Puberty Blues – the girl narrator mentions the ritual of the “surfer chicks” going to the cafe to buy burgers, chips – (for the boys).

Its ‘not cool to eat in front of the boys’ she says, so the girls gobble their food down on the walk back.

Why is that?

Divide and Conquer

Tho we all share commonality as women which unites us, we must also be willing to hear out the pain that has divided us. There is no way around it. There are no shortcuts. We must understand how the patriarchy divides and conquers us.

None of us gets a free ride. We are all discriminated against and oppressed by some difference the patriarchs have singled out, other than just being women. This is what divides us. So we don’t get the option of ignoring it. We must listen to the pain of what it means to be a woc, a lesbian, a mother, a single or childless woman, or a senior, and …. So we must be willing to hear each other’s pain of how the patriarchy attacks us in special ways. – Luckynkl (possibly paraphrased from published works)

Indeed. I so agree with this sentiment. Despite so much of the intersectionality discussion reverting to Oppression Olympics, rendering it meaningless to many radfems, we still need to be willing to listen to the pain of women’s experiences from the other oppressions. We need to understand, and that is painful, for both speaker and listener. It’s hard to separate out the pain from the tendency to place everything in boxes of a less-than vs more-than hierarchical structure. Sometimes the pain we hear from other women who have been oppressed differently to ourselves will hurt us too. As white women listen to the pain of women-of-colour, some will feel unfairly attacked as ‘racist’. Some will feel liberal white guilt. Some woc will lose all sympathy with white women who don’t *get it*. Some will think woc are just playing the ‘race card’, and some respond along the lines that the ‘race card’ is powerless to hurt other women anyway. Others will try to understand how some of their unconscious behaviours might feed into structural racism.

The women sharing their pain, may be angry, they may use ‘nasty’ words, or they may well express ‘nasty’ concepts, but framed in polite, respectful, educated language. Which makes it OK to some women, as long as its said with ‘respect’ it doesn’t matter how cruel the sentiment being expressed is. They may say things that other women find painful to hear. Don’t take it personally, some say. It is just venting in rage against the ‘system’. Or, its just an ‘opinion’ on the situation, on a set of behaviours, not the person, its not an ‘attack’. It’s not directed personally, or onto any particular group of women. Nonetheless, for some women it feels that way.

Once I saw on a radfem’s blog, a remark about a woman immigrant dressed in hijab who she sees on her commute, including a comment along the lines of wishing the woman would return to her own country. It would appear the woman’s behaviour and dress was offensive to the American woman, perhaps the woman was too patriarchally-identified or ‘contaminated’ or not ‘pure’ enough to share a public bus in America. I don’t know why, but I was upset reading this, partly because I happen to know many women from hijab-wearing cultures who continue to wear it for various reasons. Some of whom are radfem lesbians.

Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (aka Daughters of the North)

After months of reading mostly B-grade pulp, it was a fantabulous change to challenging intellectual feminist literature in this novel, which had been sitting for a long time in my To-Be-Read Pile – and I would like to thank atheist woman for encouraging me to get around to reading it!  

Sarah Hall in her early 30s, is an extraordinarily talented literary author. Her previous novels have received high critical praise, including short-listing for the Booker, and her third novel the Carhullan Army won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for best novel by a young author under 35 and the 2008 Tiptree Award.

The imagery used by Sarah Hall is steeped in the classic English literary tradition, where there is so often a thread of tragedy,  woven into the themes even in comedy works, in being able to ‘hear the rain’ in the sub-text.  Carhullan Army follows the tradition of the English Tragedy (with a capital T), and is reminiscent of other classic tragedies such as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights - particularly in her use of dark moody weather, landscape and indigenous Celtic words,  in parallel with the equally dark, tragic psychic journeys of its protagonists.   It may have been coincidental, but I think not, that most of the action on both psychic and physical planes in Carhullan Army,  takes place in the bleak and bitter winters of England’s North.   A starring role is played by the fells , becks and bields of the Cumbrian highlands.

Evocatively written in poetic prose that expresses a vivid mood and landscape – Sarah Hall manipulates readers into accompanying a woman character on a deeply personal and political Journey. Using metaphors of damaged but still beautiful landscapes violated by environmental degradation and climate change, in parallel with similar metaphors of violated, damaged, imperfect but still beautiful female life and body experience, this novel explores womanhood as the ‘human condition’.

A favourite theme in literature, the ‘human condition’ in theory, encompasses the totality of the experience of being human and living human lives.  In literary practice however, it is usually solely the male condition that is being explored, with females either absent altogether, or merely stage props for the male protagonists summarily dismissed as unimportant.  It is rare for the female half of the human condition to even be mentioned in such works.  It is refreshing to read a literary work exploring the human condition through foregrounding the Humanity of Womanhood on centre stage.  

I may not agree with, or support, all of Sarah Hall’s feminist ideas or presentations (particularly of radical lesbian separatism), but a central theme of ‘Women are Human’ gets my feminist stamp of approval.  Another stamp goes to having made some literary critics uncomfortable.

Several male literary critics for example, address the generic themes of climate change, socio-political and environmental collapse, highlighting her incredible skill as a writer, particularly her use of landscape imagery – while downplaying or even ignoring the central gender themes. In some cases, nit-picking over the plausibility or not of the plot devices, or mentioning in passing, the gender theme as ‘interesting’ in its treatment of women and political violence. Using terms like powerful and ‘Disturbing, yet compelling’.  Sarah Hall in one interview mentioned that some critics appeared grudging in their praise, saying she wrote ‘landscapes very well’ and leaving it at that.   

Similar to many high-profile women authors, from Sappho to Virginia Woolf, they have been forced to acknowledge her skill and talent, in spite of their potential discomfort with the subject. 

Okay, so much for the literary Overview – onto the story….
WARNING: Spoilers overleaf

Sex, Gender, Lies, Hate

I was reading a recent issue of Rain and Thunder http://www.rainandthunder.org/, in particular an article “Gender as a Hate Crime” by Dianne Post, who mentioned that:

“When I was lobbying for the inclusion of gender in the Arizona hate crimes statute many years ago, the man who spoke before me said that crimes against women are so common that if they were included in hate crimes, it would overwhelm the system and no one else would get any attention.”

Dianne also points out that while it is commonly agreed the ‘n’ word should be removed from common usage because it shows deep disrespect for Black people,  similar deeply disrespectful  hate-speech against women (eg b*tch, c*nt, sl*t, wh*re) is so common, it is used against women running for political office and dominates contemporary popular music, which “… urge us to kill and rape b*tches, c*nts and wh*res.  To cut them up, smother them, strangle them, drown them in the trunk of the car. And we call it art. -  When hate is so thoroughly woven into society… it is no longer seen as a crime.  It becomes the norm.”

One of the most common socially approved expression of this universal Hate, is the continuing metaphor of women as animals, ie not-human,  eg chicks, cows, bunnies, and often positioned as such in advertising, along with gender minstrel performance as a put-down, just as racial minstrel performance is.  Then there are the cultural caricatures and hated stereotypes of the nagging wife, the ball-buster and the bimbo.  To name just a few. The list is endless.

Along the continuum of hate, is the umbrella concept of Violence Against Women, including everyday street, school and workplace harrassment, incest, rape and domestic violence, pornography and prostitution, honor killings and large-scale female torture and rape-camps in wars, along with systemic social and political violence in differential access to services, health care, employment, education and treatment under the law.   Just to name a very few,  but with startling valid statistics to confirm systemic social and political oppression and hatred of women, over decades, centuries and millennia – and planet-wide. It is the universal female human condition.

The Hate usually begins in the birthing chamber with “It’s a girl” and doesn’t really end until the old b*tch, bat, cow etc is dead, for the overwhelming majority of female humans on this entire planet.  Some females don’t even survive to the birthing-chamber. 

Starter

Maggie (http://supporterofwomensliberation.wordpress.com/) prodded me into starting this – just so you know who to blame first.  Another couple of the many (you know who you are) rad wwwonderful web-wwwomen who get an honorable mention for blame are allecto at http://allecto.wordpress.com/ and Rebecca at http://rmott62.wordpress.com/.